“They look like silly, simpering girls,” snapped the Neotsarian Officer. “Although they both do have the hair and the skin colouring associated with Kordean Witches, I grant you. But, I understand that the colouring is not exclusive to the talented women; plenty of Kordeans display it.”
“Meaning?”
Coryn lifted his brows.
“Meaning that I would not consider making an offer of trading the lives of your shipboard folk for either, or both of those girls, without a demonstration of their abilities.”
The look Dian directed at Coryn said clearly: “I don’t believe this guy! Does he really think that we’re going to kneel in front of him?”
Coryn choked back a grin.
Sarah drew the Officer’s attention to herself by asking in a sweet voice:
“And what would you, Sir, consider a suitable demonstration of Dian’s and my abilities?”
A mangled sound came from Steph’s throat; he seemed to be concentrating on the controls of the monitor, his head down. Jillian was staring at the floor in front of her, as if she had just discovered an incredibly interesting spot there. The Settlement girls, Nance, Mae Lin, and the Armed Forces men merely looked bemused.
“I don’t know,” said the Military man in the other ship. “Maybe you could try pulling a rabbit out of a hat?”
“A rabbit out of a hat!” Dian clearly was insulted!
“It’s an old magician’s trick from ancient Earth,” Sarah told her before Coryn had time to get his voice under control.
“I’ll pull a rabbit out of a hat for him!” Dian shouted. “Won’t I now!”
She was all arrogant Kordean Witch, as arrogant as Marlyss might be at her haughtiest; also, obviously, angry! Coryn felt himself hyperventilating. This was not what he had had in mind, a shouting match between The Organization Officer and a furious Witch! They were in a sticky situation, after all!
“Dian, don’t!” Sarah’s voice sounded sharp and calming at the same time. “It’s not worth it to rail at the fool!”
She still had Coryn’s hand in hers; she was calming him with her touch at the same time as she was struggling to settle Dian down. Coryn realized something as the two things were happening: the connection that he and Sarah had forged between them had strengthened them both. She had internalized some of his diplomatic talents, and he had picked up some glimmering of how the Witches did what they did, and of Sarah’s ability with space ship mechanics. Fleetingly he thought to himself that perhaps he would soon know the difference between an anode and a diode.
And then he was faced with another crisis!
“We’re close enough to use our cannons on that ship!” shouted Quill. “Shall we blast a few well-aimed shots at them while they wait for the demonstration?”
His hand was hovering over the gun controls on his panel!
“No, Quill!” Coryn shouted. “There are three more ships coming at us behind that one!”
“Absolutely no shooting!” cried Dian a split second later. “I absolutely forbid it!”
Quill turned to look at Dian who was pulling out her Stone, and his expression was one of complete defiance. Coryn lunged for him but it was too late! The Navigator had sent cutting rays from the two front cannons towards The Organization ship!
The rays scored a hit, as if the enemy vessel had no shielding at all! The image of the Neotsarian Officer broke up, and the sound pick-up abruptly grew chaotic; there were screams in the background.
“Just blast them into a mess of debris!” Coryn heard the Officer in the enemy ship shout among the chaos of other sounds and voices, while he dragged Quill out of his chair, and controlled the impulse to break the Navigators jaw.
And then—nothing.
Coryn pushed Quill’s body roughly against the console next to his chair, while Lou Chen and Steph stared, Chen looking fearful, and Steph slightly amused, as if noting that the Agent did not have stores of infinite patience after all.
Dian let her stone fall back inside her shirt.
“Sorry, Sarah,” she said contritely to her colleague. “I guess I lost it. Not a good idea, I know.”
And then—
“Organization Battle Cruisers, if you’re looking for a fight, look to us, not to a Troop Carrier with almost no armaments,” said a Military voice over the General Sound System. Steph must have turned it on.
“Don’t shoot at my ship!” screamed the voice of the Neotsarian Officer. “I don’t know what the dang has happened, but we have no guns and no shields. “We’re as good as a defenceless wreck at the moment; the puny F-class Cannons of the Troop Carrier did a lot of damage!”
“Well, if that’s the case,” said the new voice, “we ought to come to an easy agreement to live and let live. We’re in neutral territory, after all.”
*****
After a conversation conducted on a private channel with Commander Valery, Coryn came to the conclusion that not all Military brass were idiots. And he took pity on Quill, and refused to send him over to Valery’s ship to be punished for insubordination.
“I’ll have a talk with him,” he said to Valery, “and ream a few strips off him. Technically what he did does not count as disobeying orders, since I’m a civilian, although in charge of this ship.”
“But to shoot, against a direct order to not do so, that’s just beyond the pale.” Valery, on the screen, shook his head. “He’ll get a demerit for that, no matter what the circumstances. I suppose that he’ll live it down if he keeps his nose cleaner than clean for a long time to come.
“But what did the Witchy women do to that Organization vessel anyway? It was unable to retaliate, wasn’t it?”
“Apparently they combined the knowledge they have of ships, and figured out a way to disable that one’s shields and cannons. The Kordean Witches believe in doing things peacefully, so the idea was to force the Neotsarians to deal with us without the capacity to fight. Sarah and Dian apparently wanted to do the same to the other Battle Cruisers we were facing, but things escalated too quickly.”
“Ah, we in the Forces could use something like that—the ability to disarm the opposition’s battle ships, that is.” Valery sounded genuinely wistful. “It could solve a lot of problems.”
“Don’t count on seeing it in common practice any time soon,” Coryn warned him. “After watching that Enemy Officer and Witch Dian go at one another… Commander Valery, that was not pretty. The Neotsarians are arrogant, but the Witches of Kordea can be, too, and, as we on this Bridge saw, their arrogance rubs even our own military men the wrong way.”
*****
He took Quill and Lou Chen to the lounge with him, leaving Steph and Jillian to mind the Bridge. He, then, called Sarah and Dian to join them in the lounge, sending Mae Lin, Nance and the Settlement girls into the galley.
“We can start preparing for supper anyway,” Nance said cheerfully as she prodded the others to go, and shut the lounge door (which was usually left open) behind them.
“Okay, Quill, Commander Valery was not happy with the fact that you activated those cannons after being told to not do so,” Coryn began, once they were all seated. “You’ll suffer a demerit for that.”
“Yeah,” said Chen, “that’s something which absolutely should not happen. It’s better to fail to shoot when told to do so, than to shoot when ordered not to.”
Quill looked stubborn.
“She’s not the boss,” he said, glancing sidewise at Dian.
“What she said is not at issue here,” Coryn stated. “I ordered you to not shoot, seconds before Witch Dian spoke. You should have been listening to me, not reacting idiotically to her words.”
Quill opened his mouth, still staring at Dian who was studiously ignoring him. Then he glanced at Chen’s closed expression, and shut it, almost with a snap. Coryn heaved a sigh of relief and turned to the women.
“You could have given us a bit of a heads up as to what you were planning,” he said.
“We didn’t know if we cou
ld do it,” Sarah protested. “We had the distance to consider, and we had to figure out how the shields and the laser cannons work, and what was the easiest way to disable them. We’d only done the one ship by the time Nance and Mae came to call us to the Bridge.”
“But we had the process figured out so we thought that we could do the other Battle Cruisers from the Bridge, assuming that we got a few moments in which to concentrate,” added Dian. “But, as you know, the opportunity never arose.”
“I guess we should have disabled this ship’s cannons, too,” Sarah said with a half-grin. “But that never occurred to us.”
“And, Dian, I didn’t really appreciate having you fly off the handle like the most arrogant Witch on Kordea, while under my command,” Coryn said. “Your behaviour made it pretty damn tough to keep things from falling into chaos.”
“I know.” Dian swallowed. “Marlyss would have given me serious shit for it. She told me to take my cues from you and Sarah, and to try to be a credit to my home world. I apologize for letting that dorky Neotsarian bait me.”
“I guess that they do know something about you Witches,” Coryn said with a grin. “Apology accepted.”
“Probably their stories about Witch Anya’s attitudes are legion,” said Sarah lightly. “She was under their thumb for a long time, and I doubt that she ever stopped snarling.”
“But, pull a rabbit out of a hat? Oh, spare me!” Dian sniffed.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The only other vehicle on the patch of tarmac on which the Troop Carrier set down was a flyer which Sarah recognized as the one from Hera’s Hope. She and the rest of The Mission had crowded into it, sometime back, to fly to The Organization Facility.
“This is where the coordinates that you gave me bring us,” Steph said. “Does the place make any sense to anyone?”
At least half of the rescue mission members were on the Bridge, observing the world outside on the screens.
“That flyer is familiar,” Sarah said with a laugh. “I remember checking it over, not that terribly long ago, with Joe Ashton. And he provisioned it before we took it to the Facility that fateful morning.”
“So the fellows must be here,” said Coryn.
The final leg of the trip had been uneventful. Sarah had muttered, after the aborted space battle that she wanted to take a look at the Troop Carrier’s engine after they had landed; she could feel with her amarto-sensitivity that some things had shifted slightly in the engine core. The sooner they were readjusted, the better, in her opinion.
Coryn had told her to feel free to do a check-up of the ship’s systems any time she wanted to, once the engines were no longer running.
He was slightly uneasy about her. She had been somewhat uncommunicative, even with him, since the journey had begun. He had had hopes that the two of them might talk during the trip; he was keen to hear about her mental experiences while comatose, for one thing. But she had been taciturn, and had not welcomed questions, not even during those sweet moments when she lay against him, after they had made love. He was not certain what was the matter, but suspected that it had to do with the fact that soon she would be coming face to face with the father and the brother who had disappeared from her life when she had been ten years old.
Of course, people coming back from the dead, no matter how welcome their return, could be disconcerting. All Sarah had said concerning them, when it came to The Mission, was that she had only seen them on the video that Jeb had made of his and Nance’s trip to the lab. During her out-of-body experience in the Neotsarian Facility, she had been blinded as to what was going on in the physical laboratory by the reflector-refractor, and the energy it had been emitting. Witch Anya had been her conduit for communicating with the physical personnel of the lab.
“I’ll maintain the ship as soon as we’ve landed, then,” Sarah had told Coryn. “It’s a good policy to make certain of your ship’s travel capacity before getting involved in other pressing matters. I learned that, rather forcefully, from the Explorers.”
“Yeah,” Coryn had agreed, grinning. “If the original mechanic of the Explorer ship Beth 117 had stuck to that policy, you might still be on Space Station XER, gritting your teeth in frustration. And I would not have had the chance to fall in love with you.”
“You’re right; Kells’ mistake of not looking after the Beth before seriously injuring himself had some far-reaching consequences,” Sarah had said. “However, his mistake is not one that I care to repeat.”
Thus, when the rest of the travellers and crew left the vessel to go search for the targets of the rescue, and the inhabitants of the village near the landing field, she went down to the engine room with a tool kit, to do the job for which she had trained, some years ago, on Earth. It seemed to her that the training days had happened in some other existence, perhaps to a different Sarah—so much lay between then and now! But she had not forgotten how to maintain a star ship; if anything, she was better at the work now than she had been before. The awakening of her amarto-sensitivity, and the consequent training in Stone use, had made her very aware of machine parts grating against each other; they seemed to call to her to come and readjust them. A silly feeling, she considered it, a personalization of something that most likely had to do with low sounds and vibrations, but there it was. The omega-transmission engines, when they started to rattle apart, began to whine at her, demanding to be re-tuned.
She enjoyed the emptiness of the space ship. The experience of being surrounded by one’s fellow travellers was inevitable during space voyages. The only way to get any alone time was to hole up in one’s cabin—presuming that the inevitable cabin mate had not settled in before you, and was willing to let you to have it to yourself. Her cabin partner was a generous one; when she needed to recoup her energies in solitude, all she had to do was mention that fact to Coryn, and he left her alone, going off to do something or other in the communal spaces of the vessel. He seemed to be the more gregarious member of their pairing. He also considered it a part of his job to interact with the passengers and crew, and had even taken it upon himself to act as teacher to Mimi and Suse!
It was nice to not have to rush off to meet more people. Her man was not missing, she mused with some amusement; he had been sharing a bed with her during the trip! And her father and brother were not going to be going anywhere while she looked after the Troop Carrier.
*****
“Where’s Sarah?” Joe asked Jillian once he had released her from a bear hug and a passionate kiss. “I would have thought that she’d have been one of the first ones to rush into the village, to see her long-lost relatives!”
“You should know what she’s up to,” his wife answered, slipping her arm into his. “You’re a ship mechanic. She took the attitude that she ought to make sure that our vessel would be in top-notch condition to travel, even if by some chance she, or you, or you both, happened to end up with bashed heads while we’re on planet!”
“Aw, what are the chances of that?” Joe countered. “She could have come, and she and I could have looked after things mechanical a bit later!”
“I think,” said Coryn quietly, “that she’s a bit paranoid about leaving space ships unmaintained on planets without much in the way of facilities. Don’t forget that for her, everything began with an improperly maintained Explorer ship on an uninhabited planet, and a ship mechanic who did suffer a serious injury!”
Joe gave him a long look.
“Woo-hoo,” he exclaimed. “Things have been happening! You look like the happiest man in the galaxy—much happier than the glum character we left in Trahea when we headed out on The Mission! Jill, my dear, what’s up?”
Jillian curled against him, and laughed.
“Just exactly what you think,” she said. “Our Liaison Officer and the star Witch have found one another!”
“Wow! I like that!”
Joe’s pleasure was clearly genuine.
Others turned to stare at grinning Coryn, too.
&nbs
p; “When you say ‘star Witch’, are you talking about my daughter, Sarah?” Peter asked Jillian.
He, Cameron, and Jerold had stood somewhat apart from the reconnecting couples who had been greeting their partners. Now Coryn stepped over to the group of three, where they stood, close to the dark-skinned, white-haired stranger who had joined the group, fetched by the youngster who had been the one to welcome the latest visitors. The Greencat which had stayed near Coryn since their exit from the ship, now padded over to the elderly black man, and positioned herself next to him.
Coryn offered his hand to the speaker.
“Peter Mackenzie, I presume?” he said. “And Cameron Mackenzie?”
He shook hands with Sarah’s brother, too.
“And you I don’t have the honour of recognizing,” he greeted the third man who appeared to be approximately his own age, sandy-haired, and with intelligent eyes.
“Jerold Lowe,” he introduced himself. “From a world nominally in Neotsarian space, but a place which has never taken their attitudes for our own. Grabbed because of my scientific talents; a useful tool, apparently. I don’t think that I’ll be going home any time soon.”
“You’re probably better off coming back to Kordea with us. Once there, you can decide for yourself what to do, and where to go.”
Coryn turned back to the Mackenzies.
“As the person responsible for The Mission these people were on, and as Sarah’s significant other, I assume that it is my job, in her absence, to welcome the two of you back into Confederation civilization. It has been a while, I understand. I imagine that you’re anxious to see your daughter and sister, and I know that she’s keen to see you, too.”
Love and Intrigue Under the Seven Moons of Kordea Page 33
